


no, there were not a thousand.

by astrid_fischer



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Greek Mythology AU, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-08
Updated: 2013-03-08
Packaged: 2017-12-04 16:45:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/712893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astrid_fischer/pseuds/astrid_fischer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>i. patroclus</p>
<p>His fate is not his own. It hasn’t been for years.</p>
<p>His heart isn’t his own, either. No, that too belongs to the reckless blond boy—not a grown man, not yet—who laughs at the gods and contradicts kings and would level an ancient city by his strength alone.</p>
<p>He is half of a whole, the shadow cast by the other’s blinding light. He has always been important only by conjunction—and only marginally so, at that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	no, there were not a thousand.

**Author's Note:**

> with my apologies to classicism (and many thank-yous again to hester, ani, and madeline miller, from whom came the inspiration for ariadne, hades/persephone, and achilles/patroclus, respectively.

i. **patroclus**

His fate is not his own. It hasn’t been for years.

His heart isn’t his own, either. No, that too belongs to the reckless blond boy—not a grown man, not yet—who laughs at the gods and contradicts kings and would level an ancient city by his strength alone.

He is half of a whole, the shadow cast by the other’s blinding light. He has always been important only by conjunction—and only marginally so, at that.

And that does not matter to him, not in the slightest, because come nightfall he is the only one to lie alongside this son of a goddess, to hear whispered promises of victory from a throat hoarse from rallying men, to trace familiar paths on well-charted skin and taste wine on the other’s sober lips.

 

ii. **ariadne and the minotaur**

He is the boy with finely turned wrists and freckles like constellations, who unspools red thread and walks with sure steps where others have wept and trembled.

The boy who is meant to fall for the hero but does not—because where would be the fun in that?—who is cast aside by Theseus but does not care, because Theseus with his black-sailed ship gets his (they always do).

Because who needs the fickle man with his empty words and empty smile when the Minotaur waits in the center of the inventor’s maze, winding red thread around inked fingers and leading the red-haired boy forward with a grin on his human face and a secret in his laughing eyes.

_You will be devoured_ , they tell him. _The beast will eat you whole._

The boy reaches the center with his artist’s hands empty. He stands and looks at the monster who is more of a man and thinks that he might not mind being devoured, after all.

 

iii. **eurydice**

He should have known better than to dance in a place where evil lurks in the tall grass, he supposes. But he is the boy who dances everywhere, when he has cause to. And today had been so very much a day for dancing.

 

iv. **hades and persephone**

The throne is his by right, but she is the one who sits upon it.

He prefers instead to lounge by her feet, to lean with his head tilted back and the column of his throat exposed, so that she might thread white fingers through his hair. This is how they hold court.

Her hair is dark and wild and her aspect fierce, and she is so beautiful it hurts to look at her. He is a study in black and white, a drawing in India ink. He smiles like the blade of a knife and she sings broken pieces of half-forgotten songs to entertain him.

His legs are a sprawl in front of him and his eyes are closed, dark lashes dusting his pale skin like shadows and lips curved up, while she drapes herself across the chair meant for him. He presses his lips to the inside of her wrist. Her laugh echoes through the caverns of deepest Tartarus, and there is something of music to it, still.

He would give her anything, anything but the light—and it has been a very long time, after all, since light meant anything to her. She was born in shadow. There is no avenging mother to hold the earth hostage for her safe return.

She does not seek the upper world—your stories were wrong. She wears white, and goes barefoot along the Lethe and dances.

(The underworld does not smell of earth. It smells of roses and metal.)

 

v. **paris**

_But it was for love. How can anything done for love bring so much evil?_

He weeps for it, for them, for his brothers. He is a prince of Troy, the ill-regarded son of a noble lineage. He measures his value not by his own merit, but by hers.

Her hands are soft, and her lips softer as they brush over his forehead, as they press gentle kisses to each of his palms in turn. She tells him it is not their fault, and he knows that she is right—she is right about most things, after all.

He knows kings, and kings are greedy. It is the city these armies set sail for, not a girl, not a girl at all (though he knows the girl to be worth more than a dozen of their cities, yes, even this one).

But men have died and men are dying, and just because it is not his fault does not mean he will ever forgive himself for it.

 

vi. **orpheus**

He is the poet from the upper world who dares to brave the underworld, the first living soul ever borne across by the boatman with the poisonous Acheron lapping at his feet and shades brushing longing, insubstantial fingers over the velvet of his coat.

He opens his mouth and spins lovely words to force Tartarus to grant what love has sought. By the music of his poetry flowers have woken up and danced and stone itself has wept.

This king is harder even than stone. He does not care. He watches with black eyes and a lazy smile while the poet sings.

She cares. The poet can see it in every aspect of her pale face, the way she sits forward just slightly, the way her fingers curl up and her eyes gaze hungrily at the bright ribbons in his hair, as if she might consume the color.

He does not know if she listens so intently because she doesn’t understand, or because she does.

Something in her expression tells him it is the latter. (For remember, she was a girl before she became a goddess.)

He is the boy who dares stand before the dire throne and the bloodstained steps and make as bold a request as the echoing vaults of the underworld have ever witnessed.

( _No_ , the king says.

_Yes_ , the queen says back.

The underworld is his to command, but he is hers.)

The ruler of shades and shadows does not like losing, and he has become fond of the green-eyed boy who dances so prettily and so sadly even in the dark. Perhaps that is why he issues the condition, offering it up as if it is nothing.

And his lady of the underground inclines her wild head in consent (because she was a girl in love once, but that was long ago and she has forgotten the word). Her crown is bone and steel and her lips are blood and she learned to be cruel from the gods.

He is the poet who Hades calls his songbird ( _What lovely feathers_ , he says. _May we keep him_? he says, and she pats his hand and tells him no).

He is the boy so driven by love that he can conquer everything by it. But love is his undoing as surely as it is his calling.

Because Hades is a liar, and there are no footsteps on the ash-strewn ground behind him as he walks up toward the light. Surely, if his lover were behind him, he would cry out? Surely?

He loves too fiercely, and he will not leave the world below without being certain.

He can feel sunlight already warm on his skin when he turns— _too soon, too soon, too soon_ —to check that the god with the black eyes has kept his promise.

From a distance, he can hear the king’s laughter.

 

vii. **eos, helios, and selene**

It is not an exaggeration to say that they are made for each other, because they fit together like nothing else in all of creation has ever hoped to or ever could.

(For what is the dawn without the sun, and what is the sun without the moon?)

The sky is theirs, the rosy fingers of morning and the glorious blaze of midday and the white moonlight on the land at night. The sky is theirs and they are each other’s.

Her hair is dark as the velvet black of her midnight, and stars shine in her eyes. She sleeps before they do, the graceful moon with her body curved like a bow, and the sun remains curled close around her while dawn shakes dreams from his eyelids and trips from bed to lighten the edges of the sky.

The sun wakes when dawn’s morning-chilled nose presses between his shoulder-blades, and it is his turn to arise from sheets and tangled wisps of cloud to drive his fiery horses forth.

She does not leave them until color begins to fade from the world, and when she does it is with a cool kiss pressed to each forehead.

Always there are two of them together, and three as often as their labor allows.

They sleep with fingers laced together, rosy dawn and warming sun and tide-drawing moon, hand in hand in hand.

 

viii. **helen**

A thousand men hate her, and a thousand more will come to. She hears what they whisper behind hands, feels the accusation heavy in their stares as she walks past, the fabric of her dress dragging in the dust behind her.

They will forget that her love story is not the cause of this strife; it is simply the excuse for it. By crying theft a king may attack a city he has always coveted. (The brother of a man who, without urging, would not have roused himself to follow her across a trickling stream, let alone the open sea.) No, this bloodshed is not for her.

They have already forgotten that. She will not forget. She knows her own story.

Her hair gleams like a precious thing in the sunlight, and gold is heavy on her wrists. She can smell the salt of the sea. Gulls cry out as they circle overhead, wheeling as white and black pinpricks against the endless blue.

She is the girl who has made her choice—because do not be mistaken, it was hers to make—and she does not regret it even now. She is a queen in her own right, and the arms of a boy she would trade the world for are wrapped firm around her waist.

They may hate her, but they do not know the shy quirk of this boy’s smile, or the way his eyes light up when they fall upon her. They do not know the pattern of freckles across his shoulders, or the quiet calm of his breathing in the still night when she cannot sleep for thinking. They do not know the sweet brush of her prince’s lips on her cheekbone, her shoulder, her palm.

She is the stolen princess who was not stolen at all. Men will blame her for a war. Her name will be a synonym for evil, for the downfall of good men, for wantonness. She will be hated for her beauty, for her love, for something she cannot help.

A thousand ships, she has heard them whisper. No, she thinks, looking out at white-winged sails and water like glass. No, there are not a thousand. But they fill the sea.

_I’m sorry_ , he tells her ten and a hundred times.

_I’m not_ , she replies each time.

 

ix. **chiron**

He is the son not of stormclouds but of a Titan, and is the kindest of his kind.

He has been taught by the twin gods themselves, and he bestows that wisdom upon boys who will become legends.

(And there have been so many who sought him out—they die, they die, they always die and he is sick with it, weary with it—but he remembers one in particular, with hair like gold coins and a voice like a battle-cry and eyes blazing even in the dim light as the sun slipped softly into the hills the night he’d first arrived at Pelion.)

This man is a legend himself, of course, but that means very little to him. He prefers the quiet, the curl of parchment in his hands and the rich earth under his fingers. It is not glory he seeks; not for him the slaughter of the battlefield or the vicious clash of steel upon steel.

Because he is who he is, he could paint himself in blood and trample the earth with sharp hooves, if he wished. He could revel in destruction.

He could learn to relish it (it would not be difficult).

Instead he teaches, because his is the way of a healer (though in the end, of course, he cannot heal himself).

The bitter future he has always foreseen draws ever closer, and the days grow darker as the age of heroes is passing, but his ancient grey eyes remain kind.

 

x. **achilles**

_Will you allow it?_ he was asked, so softly, and he had.

He had sat and watched as the smiling curly-haired boy armed himself for a war he could not fight and did not believe in. He had helped buckle the plates where the wearer’s arms could not reach, pressing playful fingers into the space between ribs.

(He had dressed his own heart in flimsy metal and let him go.)

Now he sits alone in his tent and looks at his dulled reflection in the helmet and knows that he might as well have slain the boy lying next to him with his own hand.

All he can see is too-pale skin and bloodied lips and dark curls

( _and he’s so different, so different, even in armor, even from a distance, how could you mistake them_?)

and he is still alive but half of him (only half? Has he underestimated? For loss of a half should not leave him so wholly empty, surely) is gone, and that knowledge is what fells him before he ever sets foot back on the dusty fields, before he kills a hundred sons of Priam in vengeance, before his mother’s worst fear comes to pass at last, with red on sand and blue eyes open to a bluer sky.

He will put on those golden plates still stained with his heart’s blood. He will pick up his shield, with all the world mapped upon it; he will go and fight because fighting is what he was born for, but his world has nothing to do with engravings in silver and gold.

His life is already over. All that remains is the proper disposal of it, and he will make it a glorious one. He will make them pay for what they have taken from him.

Troy will fall, with crumbling stone and roaring fire and a river roiling with blood. He will win, and for the life of him he cannot remember why it had ever mattered so very much.

**Author's Note:**

> there are a hundred and one issues with the myths i chose. selene, eos, and helios are in fact siblings usually, and troy is not a revolution, and enjolras is not really an achilles (even if grantaire would be more than happy to be his patroclus). 
> 
> the main thing i want to emphasize is that while the chiron/achilles connection is deliberate on my part, the paris/helen ~ achilles/patroclus connection is only circumstantial because of my attachment to each pairing. i don't want to give the impression that i believe marius and cosette are responsible, even a little bit, even peripherally, for what happens to e/r or to anyone else. 'cause they're not.


End file.
